My Grandmother’s Notebook
Soon after acquiring the notebook, my grandmother began to transcribe her favorite poems into it with her plum-colored, extra-fine-point Parker 51, culling from her collection of books, and creating, in essence, her own ideal poetry anthology. Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Miguel de Unamuno, and the South American feminists Alfonsina Storni and Juana de Ibarbourou, take up much of the notebook. There is also the long, fatalistic poem by the Colombian poet Leon de Greiff, his Tale of Stepan Stepanski, which she particularly loved. There are several selections too from the popular Cuban poets of her time, José Ángel Buesa and Hilarión Cabrisas, though none by the neo-Baroque poets of Orígenes. Most precious to me now, the notebook contains four of my grandmother’s own powerful poems, which she never wanted published. ¡Qué soledad tan nueva! begins one, an ecstatic, sublime night song.
Progressive and firmly anti-Batista, my grandmother was disillusioned by the Revolution. The mass detentions, the show trials, the executions, the mind-numbing sloganeering, alienated her. She concluded that the new regime not revolutionary at all, but merely the latest in an endless line of Cuban tyrannies. After a terrifying visit from a pair of militiamen, who interrogated her and also helped themselves to some of her belongings, she opted for exile, believing that her absence would be brief, and that Castro would be overthrown within a year or two. The notebook is the only thing she took with her beyond a small hardcase travel necessaire, and, naturally, her Parker 51. I imagine her looking back at her library before she turned off the lights, closed the door, and headed for the airport, saying to her books, as if to her children: don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.
She spent the first years with her stepmother and half-sister in Florida, waiting. And waiting. And waiting. As Castro’s downfall became less and less likely, her notebook took on an importance that she could not have imagined when she purchased it: it became her Noah’s Ark, preserving the best of her lost library, a tangible link to her Cuban past, when her life had been at its most vital peak. It kept her from drowning.
In 1965, she came up to live with my mother and me in the suburbs of Washington, DC. I remember meeting her at Union Station. My mother was carrying me in her arms, and when I saw my grandmother for the first time, I instinctively threw out my own little arms toward her, as if I already knew how pivotal she would prove in my life.
My mother had just divorced, and we were awfully poor, inhabiting a succession of gloomy, low-rent apartments. My grandmother looked after me, which allowed my mother to keep her day-job without having to expend on a baby-sitter. Both women skipped many a meal in order to feed and clothe me, and I never lacked for much. But for my grandmother, it was a far cry from her former life in Cuba. There were hardly any other Cubans or Hispanics to speak to; books in Spanish were scarce or prohibitively expensive. There was no money to attend concerts at Constitution Hall or, later, the Kennedy Center. She had no English with which to interact meaningfully with Americans and so became unjustly prejudiced against them, dismissing them for their “lack of culture.” The long dark winters were especially difficult for her, who had exulted in her Caribbean climate. True, she could have returned to Florida, where at least the weather was closer to what she’d known, but she had already become emotionally attached to us. Added to that, she was uncomfortable with the reactionary politics that characterized a large portion of the Miami exile community back then, among its ranks many Batista loyalists, whom she loathed as much as she did the Castroists.
She began to read aloud to me from her notebook when I was about six or seven. I delighted in the prosody, the cadences, the rhymes, this higher form of speaking. But I was also enthralled by her penmanship. I’d nestle under her arm to gaze at the pages as she read. She rendered the titles with large expressive flourishes and sometimes decorations (spirals and fantastical flowers), while the texts of the poems themselves she kept to a painfully neat, economical cursive, restraining her exuberance for the sake of legibility and precision. The poems were alive to my touch; I could feel the ruts and furrows of the words that her 51 had engraved into the cheap yet sturdy paper. I still remember accompanying her, in the role of translator, to the old Fahrney’s Pen Shop, when it was on New York Avenue, to have the tines of her Parker aligned, or to purchase a bottle of Sheaffer Skrip blue-black, her favorite ink.
My grandmother’s notebook was more than simply my first encounter with literature. It was a source of wonder and new power, reinforced by the thrilling anecdotes she’d tell that made poets seem like prophets of their people, like the story of Nicaraguan children casting rose petals at the feet of Rubén Darío. It made me want to become a writer. A child of divorced parents, I intuited that here was a way to rise above, or at least give voice to, the precarious world around me. Suddenly, I had a task, an identity, a means of escape. Ruthless as one of those militiamen who looted my grandmother’s apartment, I stole a marbled composition book from my third-grade supply room. With a leaky school fountain pen, I wrote POEMS on its cover, in a hand as close to my grandmother’s as I could achieve. But then reality struck: I realized that I had not written any poems, ever. It was one thing to admire poetry, another to make it oneself. No matter: I had taken the crucial, initial step, staked my claim. The blank composition book was enough for now to make me a writer, at least in my own eyes. I carried it under my arm with supreme self-importance. Years later, when I saw Jean Cocteau’s film, Orphée, I felt vindicated by the young poet, Cégeste, who publishes an acclaimed poetry collection made up entirely of blank pages.
Most of the entries in my grandmother’s notebook she made in Cuba, but not all. I remember her joy the day she found a sonnet by the Uruguayan modernista, Julio Herrera y Reissig, reprinted in an issue of Diario Las Americas, a Miami-based Spanish-language rag popular in those days among the exiles, and which frequently, as I remember it, would announce Castro’s imminent death from cancer or an uprising, at last, of the starving Cuban masses. She copied the sonnet immediately into the notebook.
The final entry, on page 196, is Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, made near the end of her life. At first, this choice of text is a bit surprising. My grandmother was a self-declared atheist and often pointed out what she considered to be the many absurdities and contradictions in the Bible. But I think that Ecclesiastes, one of the most despairing books of the Old Testament, questioning life itself, would have struck a chord with her own desperation and her need for consolation. For, as much as she loved us, and we her, she suffered irremediable homesickness. Often, she regretted having left Cuba at all. “I would be happy just to live on a bench beside the Malecón,” she’d say, referring to the famous seawall along Havana’s coastline. Her notebook, increasingly tattered and scotch-taped, must have helped her endure so many miserable days–until it couldn’t, until not even poetry could…
She was only 63 when she died. I was sleeping on a cot next to her at the hospice, when the nurse woke me up past midnight: it was time. I watched my grandmother’s gaze and mouth set into a sweet, innocent expression, purged of all bitterness, of all exile and history. She looked like a little girl who’d just opened her eyes on a resplendent tropical morning, back in her own bed in Havana.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
My passage from childhood to adolescence was very difficult. I required inordinate amounts of sleep, weighed down by a feeling of heavy sadness. I could find no specific reason for it. I could not articulate my pain; words failed me, and I felt that not even my beloved grandmother understood me, she, who was my mentor and confidant in all things. I felt agonizingly lonely, yet I did everything I could to be alone. I suddenly withdrew, abandoned friends and games, and neglected all of my subjects at school. My mother was angry and frustrated. She had sacrificed so much to send me to a good private school.
I was also horribly self-conscious and avoided—feared—the eyes of others. I had a winter parka, the large fur-lined hood of which I would refuse to take off even indoors, preferring to hide my face in its hot stifling recesses. My teachers gave up on me and let me sit in the back of the classroom, unresponsive, mute. I was too strange even to be bullied. It was as if I had collapsed into myself and no longer had any place in the external world.
One day, I chanced upon a book in the school library, a very thin volume from the Vanguard Press. Metamorphosis, it read, and Franz Kafka. I had ever heard of this author before. The translation was by A. L. Loyd—the first into English from the original German, in fact, but I would only learn that later. On the front and back end papers were strange drawings by Leslie Sherman, consisting of deer-like figures, a kangaroo, and a couple of large squirrels. What kind of book was this? A children’s story-book? A fairy tale about animals? It couldn’t be–the preface by one Paul Goodman (utterly unknown to me at 13) had weighty, incomprehensible terms like “totemic identification” and “continuum of the libido.” Fortunately, I did not give up and pressed on to the story itself, to its opening sentence: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin.
Monstrous—that was how I felt! It is impossible to convey how this sentence spoke to me, how it seemed to capture my own predicament. To this day, I consider it the greatest opening in all of literature. It presents the story’s fundamental premise without preamble or build-up. It is practically a short-story in itself! But again, what kind of story? I couldn’t, immediately, tell. I grasped for a category. Was it Horror, or Science Fiction? The language seemed disarmingly simple, limpid, in fact there was something of a children’s book about it, but I could sense layers and layers beneath. I empathized directly with Gregor’s exhaustion, with his inability to get out of bed or to explain himself (his words lose their “real shape”), not to mention the terrible guilt he feels toward his family. So, what if I was over-identifying with Gregor with all the self-centeredness of an unhappy adolescent? Desperate for models of living and writing, I was not reading for literature, but for sheer survival.
Though Gregor Samsa’s transformation was the stuff of fantasy, it was the story’s realism that struck me, the specificity and physicality throughout, such as the father’s increasingly shabby doorman’s uniform, or his “Wertheim safe,” not just any safe, but a Wertheim one, made by a real company founded in Austria in 1852. Or the details of Gregor’s new insect body, and those brown stains he leaves on the white door jamb as his father forces him back violently to his room. Several characters struck me as positively Dickensian in their vividness, such as the old, big, boney charwoman, who taunts Gregor: “Come on, you old cockroach!” but who alone is not disgusted by him. Or those three lodgers, forbidding, yet somehow comedic, fidgeting with their identical thick beards. And of course, that manager who shows up at Gregor’s home, demanding to know why he is late: I had not yet ever held an actual job, but what a foretaste this gave me of the real-life terrorism of bosses.
For several months, Metamorphosis was all that I read, my only book. I shut out all else. I was fascinated by the contrast between its linguistic simplicity and its endless depth. I barely did any homework—my grades were appalling. I would read it through to the end and start over. I’d read it on the bus, during math class, and even, rudely, at the dinner table, to my mother’s quite justified indignation. I couldn’t exhaust it—great works like this cannot be. I lived inside the book. It was my covert and chrysalis. Back then, it was all to me about Gregor—that is to say, about me—and the struggle of the outsider, and the terrible cost of liberation. My sympathy for Gregor has never diminished, but these days I am just as fascinated by the portrayal of his family, and that striking last image, so life-affirming, of sister Grete stretching her young, nubile body—it is about their liberation, too! If only Gregor had realized sooner that he was not, after all, indispensable to them. What different choices he might have made.
I have never again read with such total immersion. Although it was a period in my life of excruciating pain, I envy the boy that I was for the intensity of his reading. I almost regret that I have read too many books since—wouldn’t it have been better to experience just a few, but this deeply? In periods of difficulty—for I have fallen through that trap door of the Self yet again a few times – I always recover my bearings by returning to this text, and to this specific translation, even though I have learned German and can now read it in the original. I am no scholar, let alone a Nabokov, and consider myself unqualified to enter debates about which is the best or most accurate translation; all that I can say is that A.L. Loyd’s is how Kafka first spoke to me, changing my life, and it still leads me back to what is most essential.
When summer came that year, and I was free of school, I more or less locked myself in my bedroom (so embarrassingly like Gregor!). Though I had considered myself a poet before, reading Kafka awakened me to the possibilities of prose fiction, and I began to write my first stories. I also read more of Kafka—”The Judgement,” “In the Penal Colony,” The Trial, his marvelous letters to women, and his diaries. It might seem on the whole like rather depressing summer fare for a 13 to14 year old, but a strange thing happened. I went back to school in the fall semester a changed being, alert, engaged, cleaned-up, and self-confident. A new person! Everyone was stunned. I started repairing friendships and forging new ones among my peers. My grades, at least in English, improved dramatically. Wonderful things happened—our English teacher, Willee Lewis, invited Isaac Babel’s daughter to speak to our class, as well as the Countess Alexandra Lvovna, Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, who was very old but sharp, especially in her condemnation of Henri Troyat’s biography of her father. I was more determined than ever on becoming a writer. It was as if Kafka, not at all Kafkaesque, had taken my hand and walked me out of the darkness.
Touchstone Writers
Touchstone writers may or may not always be “great” authors, but they help other writers out of dry spells or stuck moments. They snap us out of our inertia, make us want to write again. For me, it is usually the flow or rhythm of their sentences—I have merely to read a page or two to find my way back to my desk. Or they explore aspects of life that no-one else has touched. For whatever reason, they revive me. I owe them so much! My list includes: J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, Franny, and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters!; Richard Wright’s novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground;” William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice; Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights; F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night; more or less everything by Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, and Elizabeth Bowen; Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; “Dance of the Infidels” by Alston Anderson; Erskine Caldwell’s “The Cold Winter;” Calvert Casey’s “El Regreso;” practically all of Hemingway’s stories; the “pulp” novels of Jim Thompson; Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig; Faulkner’s The Wild Palms and Light in August; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas; the harvest scene in Anna Karenina. I am grateful to them all.
